The present invention relates to a copper alloy as well as to the making of a copper alloy in preparation of the making, and to be used within the process of making, a mold for continuous casting, such as a mold for continuous casting of high melting metals, such as steel.
In the past molds to be used for this purpose were made of copper of the type SF--Cu, which, owing to its particularly high thermal conductivity is capable of extracting rapidly a large amount of heat from the molten metal being cast. The walls of the mold are (or can be made) sufficiently thick so that they can take up the expected mechanical load and wear. In order to increase the hot strength of such a mold, it has been proposed to use an alloy that includes at least 85% copper and at least one alloying element which causes precipitation hardening. Here then, one may use up to 3% chromium, silicon, silver, and beryllium. However, a mold made of this particular alloy was not completely satisfactory, because, unfortunately the particular components silicon and beryllium reduced its thermal conductivity of the resulting product rather drastically (see AT-Patent 234,930).